Clipped Fingernail

Cigarette ends like red poppy seeds
and the moon just like peeling skin,
a clipped fingernail
and yet no person to be first to criticize.
The beggar speaks French and the treetops speak French and the clipped fingernail speaks French
but the world speaks dead languages like buried ideas with a bell in their coffin,
and beggar with an umbrella frame and no fabric challenges the clipped fingernail moon,
and dead-language speaking world combs their mustache and laughs like the sneering faces at a dogfight,
and beggar asks for money in exchange for a poem he will write for world, to
but beggar criticizes clipped fingernail moon, but beggar speaks French,
and does not gather others' hair and paste it to his upper lip and comb it at dogfights,
he does not sleep with buried ideas,
beggar sleeps under bridges with bellies of jazz and hands that are rusted saxophones,
and world doesn't even know his name,
it's too French.

-anna sluder

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